[00:00:00] The RIP show where it's all about building revolutionary information products so you can work smarter and scale your business faster. And now your host Richard Chancey.

[00:00:11] Welcome back to the show. This is session number five. I'm so excited to be with you today we're going to talk about probably one of the things that's top of mind for you which is how do I find a profitable market. So we're going to dive into this and hopefully we're going to explore this topic in a way that might be a little bit more systematic and a little bit different from anything that you've heard before.

[00:00:32] So here's one thing that we need to start off with just a basic principle. It is way more fun to run a profitable business than it is to run one that you're passionate about but you can't make money with OK because when you're doing things that you're passionate about and you're not making money if they're not a hobby you're basically just rob and from yourself maybe your family you're spending a lot of time on something that's not really loving you back and that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Now I will tell you this to combine the idea of passion with business. It takes more work than just building a profitable business or just building up a business that you're passionate about. You're going to have to dig in and do the hard work. So we're going to dive into this episode we're going to talk about a principle that comes out of the book Good to Great by Jim Collins hopefully you've all heard of it. I'm hoping a lot of you have read this book it's one of the best books out there for business leaders to be able to take a look at statistics and empirical data that talk about what makes a business go from good to great and keep moving forward. By the way that book starts off with a quote that says this. The good is the enemy of great. And I think you'll be able to agree with me that in any year of your life where you look at things where they're good it's harder to go from good to great than it is from failure to great. A lot of times.

[00:01:47] Another principle that Jim Collins talks about in this book is the idea of the hedgehog principle. Now the hedgehog principle is basically the intersection of three things. What you're deeply passionate about what you can be the best in the world at and what drives your economic engine What are you passionate about. What can you be great at and what's the economic benefit of those things. And that's what we're going to be talking about today on the show and I am so excited to dive into this with you because I did all of this wrong starting out. And I want to be able to help you start things off right. OK so let's dive into this hedgehog principle just personally let me tell you what I'm passionate about and where these three things collide my passions are igniting passions in people. One of the big reasons I started this podcast was to help you get over the hump of starting your first informational product your first digital product starting your first online business whatever those things are. That's what I'm passionate about is helping people break through and take that next step and going forward. I'm also really excited about helping people just improve the quality of their life. I help them have better marriages. And for me the best way for me to do that is to train people on how to start businesses like this.

[00:02:56] Now you might be thinking Well Richard has a business like this going to make somebody's life better you would be surprised my wife and I just went on our 20 year anniversary this past weekend and we were just talking about one of the best things I've done for our marriage over the last 20 years is starting this business. Was it hard in the beginning. Absolutely that it was. But the bottom line is this now we have a lifestyle that most people can only dream of in fact this morning I got up and I make my own schedule. Right. And so I got up this morning and I went in I studied for a while putting together the notes for this podcast now I'm shooting the podcast this afternoon I'm going to do something else that's related to my other business. All of that is by my design which really is one of the best things I've ever done in my life and it also makes me a healthier person outside of working hours. And that's why I'm so passionate about helping other people start businesses like this. Now what's the economic engine will. Obviously there are many. Right so we can sell digital products we can offer services we can do affiliate marketing we can do referral marketing whatever those things are. There's just a ton of different economic factors that play into this. Now I'm going to talk more as we go through this process about how I didn't use what I'm about to teach you to start in this business and I'm hoping you can learn from my mistakes and Skyrocket a lot faster than I did. By following a few simple rules for finding a profitable market. Now before I dive in and talk to you about the seven qualifications of a profitable market I want to tell you this. No niche is too small.

[00:04:25] If you dominate it I realized that there are a number of you on the podcast today that don't get to choose what nature in right you're working for somebody else and they're saying hey we're selling to insurance guys or we're selling to real estate people or we're selling to pasters which is what I did. You don't get to choose how you do business with but you can choose a niche inside of that market. Let me give you an idea of what I'm talking about when I was doing church construction consulting we were going out and selling two and a half to 10 million dollar projects and so I realized pretty quickly you've heard me tell this before that I was going to starve to death if I just did pick up the phone and call a bunch of churches. So I started to kind of build a brand and as I built that brand I got some jobs renovating warehouses and old retail shopping centers for churches and I decided that that's what I was going to be known for in that industry is the God that knows how to do that really well at least the thought leader on how to convert retail space into worship space for churches. And I did six projects while I was working for that that company front to back. I consulted on many more all around that retail thing I really made that focus. Does it mean that I won't. I wouldn't do business outside of that marketplace. Absolutely not.

[00:05:35] But when I'm going out and I'm putting a footprint into the marketplace I'm super specific inside of the niche inside the church niche that I'm the guy that you need to call when you want to renovate a retail property for a church or worship space. OK. So the other thing I wanted to tell you before we dive into the set of qualifications is don't let this bog down. In fact I would tell you this. Set a goal date and say OK by X date I'm going to have my market picked and I'm going to be moving forward in that market. Some of that's a little bit vague but when you put a date on things you know that on that day you're going to take a step back from doing any more market research and you're just going to go and start putting thoughts out into the world whether that's a blog or a blog or a lead magnet whatever that is that by X date you're going to pull the trigger and you're going to get going. You are going to learn way more by doing this then you will be planning to do this. I hope that makes a lot of sense. I don't want you to rush out and do this willy nilly. Don't don't hear me saying that you definitely need to do a little bit of market research before you do this but I want you to go out do the market research have a definitive date that you're going to say OK I'm done with that. Now I'm going to move forward because as you dive into your market you may find a different niche that's more profitable for you or a completely different niche it may be time to pivot. But I want to move forward as quickly as possible.

[00:06:53] OK with that being said let's dive into these seven things these seven qualifications of a profitable marketplace. The first one is the customer currently pays for a product or service in your space. If I'm selling primarily to people that want to create digital products that is a really crowded marketplace. As you know there's a ton of different podcasts about online business and entrepreneurship and all that stuff. If I'm if I'm going into the marketplace rom trying to serve authors who write or speak on selling think about how that narrows the phone the focus. OK. We're not niche down inside of that nature of online business and I go I'm just going to focus on authors that write or speak on selling because that's kind of my history my background is selling. I've worked with authors I've written a couple of books. I can put together skills training for those people without. That's a no brainer for me. Done for you solutions in that space gets even more Nira because I know that most people in that space are spent and every day waking up trying to get speaking gigs and then going out and doing the speaking gigs they don't have any time to build a membership site to build a web in order to build automated email processes. So we can create done for you solutions in that market place and we have almost zero if not zero competition for those done for you solutions so it's really important as you're going out that the person pays for products and services in your space. But that's not the only qualifier you've got a niche down and make sure that you can make some waves in a particular niche in that industry.

[00:08:20] Number two is this lucrative industries. This week I got a call from a buddy of mine and he said hey I've got this opportunity it's kind of overwhelming to me. These guys called me up and said hey we want you to do some Facebook marketing with us and he said OK I can jump all over that. And then the next thing he knew he had tons of different opportunities inside the same company. And basically what it was it was a pharmaceutical company that sells competitive product to Botox to plastic surgeons. So stay with me here on this show. One of the plastic surgeons calls that my friend up says Hey can you do some marketing with me. That person sales guy for the pharmaceutical company gets a hold of my buddy and says hey if you can do this we can send you some other business. And the next thing he knows he's got 10 or 12 of these conversations going on and he doesn't know how to scale this thing up. But here's the bottom line. The product that they're selling for a service it's $5000. So that means that the client value to the pharmaceutical company is roughly five thousand dollars maybe half of that five hundred because the plastic surgeons keep some of it. But let's say bottom line that you know they're there get twenty five hundred bucks out of it. They're actually giving the pharmaceutical or the plastic surgeon money to do marketing for this product. So the money that my buddy is going to be spending on Facebook's not even coming from the customer it's coming from the customers wholesaler. It's crazy it's a crazy thing.

[00:09:39] But this is what we absolutely know in that marketplace. It's going to come in to pay $5000 for a product that is a lucrative lucrative industry. Now the other thing that you need to know is the plastic surgeon this may just be a lead generation offer for him. You know he's making twenty five hundred three thousand dollars but his average value may be 10 20 30 thousand dollars for a client that is a super lucrative industry. So when you look at things like that you have to go OK we absolutely know that this is a lucrative industry. We also can look at other industries and this is absolutely not a lucrative industry. Most of us are going to do business somewhere in between. So you've got to make sure that when you go to market that there is actually money to be spent in that marketplace. OK. By the way I turned this offer down because one of the things you're going to notice as you start to move forward in this business. This is a huge point. It's not even in my notes this is freestyle and this is this. This is what you need to know when you get good at something people are going to come along and they're going to want to leverage that skill to benefit them or their vision or where they're going. That's just the nature of capitalism. You've got to have a medieval focus on what it is that you are trying to do. Otherwise calls like that could easily pull you off center. And here's how I know that I've done that a million times.

[00:10:54] If you don't get focused on what you're trying to do I promise you you will get distracted and you will never get where you're trying to go. Now you also want to find your blue ocean strategy in the middle of this OK. I talked about this with niches but if you don't if you can't find the blue ocean and the blue ocean is red ocean is where all the sharks are swimming everybody is trying to feed on the same thing. Back to the business industry. If you look at that if you go on Facebook right now and you've been following anything related to entrepeneurs you'll have 10 different ads that you'll see on there for how to grow your online business or how to build a web or do e-mail marketing whatever those things are. You've got to get away from the red ocean no matter what your niche is no matter what your industry is. You've got to be able to get away from where everybody else is selling and niche down to the people that are going to resonate with the message that you're bringing to market. The third the third qualification of a profitable market is just a profit driven mindset. And you might be thinking well doesn't everybody have a profit driven mindset. No they do not even in industry sometimes where you would think that they do. They don't. I can give you a perfect example of that is anybody that sells to Astle medical services to hospitals at one time we did physician recruiting. And so we sold to the physician recruiter. Now get this now. I work for a company that goes out and finds doctors for hospitals.

[00:12:11] The person that has to sign off on hiring this is the person that's job is to go out and find doctors for the hospital. Right so we had to go in and go hey our job is to make you look good in the same vein this person's thinking if this person if these this company is really good at what they do. Why does the why does the hospital need me. OK so that is not a profit driven mindset. The mindset in that situation is how do I make this person look like a rock star. OK and you don't do that by selling money and if you go in and you try to sell money to somebody like that most of the time you're not going to get business. You're looking for profit driven mindset which means if I if you spent X with us you should make Fibe X and you can put guarantee's around whatever you need to do that but you're selling a dollar for a $5 bill. That's the basic parts of it. Now everything I'm telling you right here none of these are written in stone. These are good guidelines to give you the highest probability of profitability. OK. High probability of probability. That's what we're talking about. Can you violate some of these rules. Sure. If you break too many of them you are heading down a path it's going to lead to frustration and failure. OK. All right.

[00:13:18] So the key people that you would want to focus on or good examples of profit driven mindset people are small business owners just about anybody that owns a small business is interested in ways to generate more business and they will spend money to do that. Another example is doctors a lot of times doctors especially if they're specialties they are looking for additional ways to market additional ways to create efficiencies in their business processes those kinds of things. Dennis are another good example of doctors and Dennis I know the kind of fit in the same bucket but they have two different mindsets and two different types of customers. You know most people have to go see a doctor or dentist. People don't have to go see him they really should but they don't have to. The other type of entity would be like a sales organization. Anytime you're talking to an organization that lives and dies and they have a culture of selling well those people are also very good at buying and they appreciate good sales process. OK so it's easy to go in and say hey if you spend this then we should be out to help you generate x. You're always going to find it more difficult when the incentive for purchase is a non-financial outcome that you're selling. Pay this. That's always going to be more difficult then you know if you spend X you're going to get Y. OK. Just keep that in mind. Now I know that some of you are in industries where you can't help that you're selling a value proposition. You've got to be great at that. You've got to make sure that you truly understand the value proposition and you can speak to that person at the core level.

[00:14:42] And you know what the benefit is for them and often the benefit for them is not the same as it is for the organization we miss that as salespeople. A lot of times where we think well if the company makes more money or they recruit more people or they do X and then they're going to be happy and that may be true but the person that's buying it that may not be their primary motivation. You've got to know what that primary motivation is before you get to market. OK. The next qualification is you've got to have a large enough pond to fish. This is very hard to talk about in a general standpoint. OK but I'm going to give you a few metrics here and then you need to create your own metrics for this because it really does depend on what you're selling if you're selling business to business. You've got to have a minimum of 5000 to 10000 businesses that you can go after if it's much less than that you're just not going to be able to make a big enough impact in that marketplace even if you're killing it and you're getting massive market share. You still may not be making enough money to have a business. OK and you've got to determine what that is. Now the minimum Facebook audience that you're looking for. So when we're going in and we're looking at trying to find profitable markets or we're partnering with a company that's saying hey we need to find our audience what we're looking for the first thing we do is we go into Facebook and look at audience sites and we're looking to see if we can find 100000 people with a related job title to that industry. OK.

[00:16:01] That's that's a very simple search. That's not a comprehensive search. That's not what we would do if we were on Facebook ads to those people. Obviously those job titles would be kind of the center focal point for what we would put in front of them for ads. But it's not the endpoint that we're starting with but if we go into Facebook and we you know we're selling a $250 product or a thousand dollar product and we can't find more than a couple of thousand people with a job title related to people that would buy that service then we need to back up and figure out if we're putting a product in the wrong marketplace. Sticking with the example of selling services to authors and speakers when I did a quick Amazon search I noticed there's about a hundred eighty five thousand results on Aimee's on Amazon when I search the word selling. OK. And probably in reality there's probably only about 20 percent of those that are relevant to what I'm talking about which is authors who speak on selling only about 20 percent of those which is about thirty seven thousand people. Now if I'm selling a $1000 course on how to build membership to those people I'm in trouble already. OK I'm only fishing in upon that has 37000 people in it. Are there more out there. Maybe but you and I both know that the top 20 percent of those people are doing 80 percent of the business. OK so that brings us down to about 4500 to 5000 people that are potential for this product. And if we got 20 percent of the market a thousand.

[00:17:19] I mean we're not. I mean we'd have to kill it to have a million dollar business in that industry. I mean absolutely kill it. Now some of you may be thinking may I would kill to have a million dollar business. Me too. OK so we're all in the same boat on that. This is what I'm telling you. If a homerun is a million dollar business you start with your. You're setting your your sights way too low and you're not really giving your yourself the best probability for profitability. Ok I'll stop saying I'll say that again. Probability of profitability. OK. Now if I'm selling solutions in that same market space where we go in and we do a done for you solution and I'm creating content for them webinars for them I'm building a membership site and helping them build the content that goes on that. And we're doing some sort of revenue split where I could have three or four of those 5000 people and have a $2 billion business that pretty much is on autopilot. OK so the large enough pun to efficient is really important it depends on your product and who's in the marketplace. But this is the thing you need to know begin with the end in mind. Put some metrics down on paper and say this is the kind of market that I'm going to look for with my product or service or what I think my offering is and then help your offering match the marketplace that you're going to fish in the next qualification is you can market to them.

[00:18:35] This is really obvious but I felt like it needed to make the list. If you can't reach people by phone email Facebook linked and Twitter message boards referral partners if you do not have a realistic tactic to get your message in front of these people then you don't have an audience it doesn't matter how great your product is. If you build it people will not come. People are not just going to come and buy your product. It's not going to sit out on the Internet you're not going to do a little bit of SEO and have a windfall. If you're listening to other podcast and you hear people say well we started the business and four months later we are doing a million dollars. I just heard a guy say that on the podcast driving home from doing the notes on this you know four months later we're doing a million dollars in revenue. I mean the bottom line is that's just not realistic. Does it happen. I'm sure it probably does but that is not a strategy a strategy is not. I'm going to go out and try to do what one tenth of one percent of people do. This is going to take hustle in the first part of the hustle is having a realistic plan for how you're going to put your message in front of your people and keep them on people first. Right. You want to go out you want to find the people that you're best equipped you have the greatest opportunity to serve. Medium second.

[00:19:41] So how you're going to put your message in front of those people if you don't have the people nailed down or the audience nailed down and you don't have the medium nailed down you do not have a go forward strategy just yet. The next one the next qualification is you can sell to the decision maker how your ears should be wide open right now because this is really important. If you want a complex business involve yourself in a sales process that involves more than one person because ultimately that's going to wind up with you having to coach a champion selling your product or service to a group of people that almost always equals failure. OK and I'm going to give you some hope on that in a second. But a moment that second per person enters the sales process you go from having a simple sale to a complex say oh I don't care what you're selling. When you add multiple people into it you've got a complex sales and certainly if you have to sell to somebody else and then they go and talk to their boss or their committee or whatever it is. And that committee is the one making the decision. You if you're starting and there that's if you have the option of not being in an industry like that don't be in it. Now for those of you that are in that industry I feel your pain. I've I've worked in two different industries in fact my primary digital product is in an industry just like that right now and here's what I would tell you this is the best advice that I can give you. Take it step back from your sales process. Look at it and say OK how do I help this person.

[00:21:01] So my thing or how do I create so many questions that the person would never go in and try to sell it they're going to bring me in. When I was in church construction consulting I would have to go in and build a long relationship with a pastor and then over the course of a year or a year and a half they would invite me to meet with their committee hopefully. And then I went in one time and I think I told the story on an earlier podcast but it's worth saying again right here. I went into one and you know sat down and the pastor just introduced me and said hey this guy is a great guy who loves Jesus. It's $50000 to get started. And I thought OK that's a terrible introduction. Anybody that's ever sold anything knows you don't lead with price. This god. I didn't get the job and I went back and I said OK I've got to make a better process. And so we built a better process for doing some free consulting that ended with me doing a presentation to the entire decision making body a state of the Union for this decision making body which was really the sales environment. So I'd get them in there and tell them what was right and what was wrong with their finances to be able to go forward. And then I had the opportunity to close them on the next step with our digital product right now.

[00:22:05] So if you are selling digital products into a space where you know that multiple people are going to be involved in the decision the way we do that now is we sell the primary decision maker on a web in most of the time I think that's the person that's on our web or so we'll teach and then we do an offer they sign up for a free trial during the free trial we created a meeting agenda for them that last an hour and it starts with a 12 minute video from the past or that our partner with who's the subject matter expert and he speaks at the corps level to this pastor and his group of people and poses some good questions and then when they're all say we say hey here's three questions we want you to answer before you finish the meeting and the three questions are not related to our product is related to how they're doing as a church and at the end. The pastor says we give the line. You say this and you get hands raised or no and you make a decision about moving forward with this thing and bar none when when pastors have that meeting and they decide to buy our product. They never back out because one of the benefits of selling groups like that is if they make the decision as a team they got to unmake it as a team as well which almost never happens so there is a slight benefit to that but it doesn't outweigh the downside of just being able to sell one. The next qualification is this profitable businesses. My mom always used to say if you run with the dogs you get fleas. OK if you target businesses that aren't profitable. Sooner or later your business won't be profitable either. Let me say that again if you target businesses that aren't profitable sooner or later your business won't be profitable either.

[00:23:38] OK. You want to look for businesses that are generating at least a hundred thousand dollars in profit. Now again this is all qualified by what you're selling you may be in an industry where a $100000 in profit means they are about to go out of business. OK. Create your own qualifications create your own definition for what it means to be profitable. If you're selling to individuals they're making at least $80000 a year if I'm selling to people that are trying to build on businesses and the average person is making $17000 a year and I'm selling a $2500 $3500 process to get up and running well this person is going to spend everything they got just to get trained they don't have any money left to build their business with. So it's important that you determine ahead of time what a profitable business is and who you're going to go after. Now does that mean you won't do business with people that are outside of that demographic. Absolutely it does not mean you won't do business with them. It doesn't mean that you're not going to spend money on marketing outside of that demographic because. Because your purse your money and your message need to be in line with the person that you're talking to. Let me let me give you an example of why that's important. If I'm talking to you right now instead of thinking that you're a 41 year old professional guy that has built a legacy in your industry or at least you've got you're reputable in your industry you've been in it a long time. You know what you're doing.

[00:24:53] If I'm if I'm speaking to you and I'm to I'm running these things down from you and I've got you in my mind. Well the messaging is a lot different than if I'm talking to a 26 year old millennial that wants to start a business like this and hasn't had any real experience out in the marketplace but has got the drive in the hustle. Well it's a completely different messaging. Neither one of those markets is inherently better or worse. But the messaging the examples that you use the messaging you take the market what you speak when you're trying to speak at the core level is radically different between those two groups of people. And that's why it's so important that you've well-defined who it is that you're going after. Now let me give you an example of how I did that in the church space when I got into that industry. Most of the thought process was just get on the phone and call people in to find somebody in the church and go after those people. And I've said it before but I just decided to go at it from a different way. And as I began to look at our project I realized there was some fairly simple math that I could do to determine what my market should be at least from a financial standpoint because we couldn't do construction projects less than $2 billion. OK it's just we weren't the kind of size company that could do that. When you get above $10 billion we weren't the right company for that either. And there a lot of projects on both sides of that that a lot of people thought we should go after.

[00:26:07] But I just said you know it doesn't make a lot of sense because we're not going to be profitable on projects that are below that $2000000 Well when I look at it. There's there's some easy math. We always you know tell churches you can build three times your annual income plus cash Monistat you don't need to know all that. What that shakes out to me is about a church of about 600 650 people could build a 2 million dollar project minimum. So when we're out I'm getting phone calls from people that are saying hey when you come out build our church for us. Well how many people in your church. Well we've got 350 people in our church. Why I knew that I could give them some wise counsel over the phone. But from a profitability standpoint in a making sense for eating and living in standpoint it makes no sense for me to go out and meet with that church because the company that I worked with was simply not the right company to build a project that size. The same is true when you're building an online project. Now let me tell you how we had to flip that idea when we started selling digital products into the same space online when we started to put this product online we didn't go after the rightsize church we didn't go out and say OK we want to do business with churches that are 600 to 650 people.

[00:27:13] Instead we looked at where the center of the marketplace was and we put our product in the middle of that river in the middle of that river and Church Road is a church that's probably 100 to 150 people which means their annual income somewhere about 150 to 200 thousand dollars. The pastor is making 80 to a hundred thousand dollars maybe a little bit less than that. And so we knew that that was a part of the marketplace where we can make an offering Now if we come to market with a twenty five hundred dollar one time payment offering Well we're not going to do a lot of business and that's why we felt like the right place the right part of that market to offer a solution was about ninety nine dollars per month. OK. I hope that makes sense because sometimes you've got to come at it when you when you have a product that you're already selling and you're looking at your marketplace. You've got a niche now to figure out OK who will we go after and who won't we. But then if you have the flexibility to go to market you need to look at where the center of the marketplace is and see if you've got a solution that will fit in there. That also puts you in blue ocean and for us hardly anybody in that space has been digital products online. There were some people doing it. Most of them invest in training every year but they go to events which is exponentially more expensive than what we do. OK so I hope that makes sense. Now let me let me say this and wrap it up. That's the second criteria. Let me let me just say this confession time I did not go at this from this direction when I built this product.

[00:28:32] I didn't know what I was due and I didn't know anything about setting up marketplaces. I didn't even know to go online and start listening to podcasts and have people help me understand how to do this. In fact of these seven criteria the business that we sell in church world are the product we sell in church world world. There weren't any there wasn't anybody paying for a launch writing so nobody's bought a service or product like we're selling. It wasn't a lucrative industry. That's pretty self-explanatory. Not a profitable driven mindset not a profit driven mind set at all. We're selling value we're selling church growth we're selling reaching your city. Those things we cannot sell money. It was a large enough industry for sure. There's about 350 churches in America. We could reach them with Facebook. Actually there are a ton of churches in the United States that are communicating with their people in their church primarily through Facebook. So that was a huge advantage that we had which which is worth noting there is no industry that's probably going to exhibit all seven of these there might be a few If you find one or two things in here that give you reason to believe that that one or there's one or two things might overwhelm the rest of these. Then you have my permission to go after it. OK. Because Facebook was a critical element to be able to able to get where we are now. Now we're kind of moving into doing Facebook as well as doing some partner webinars with other people that are selling noncompetitive products in our industry and that's working out really well too.

[00:29:50] But that would not have worked had we not grown our e-mail list to 30000 people using Facebook. We we could sell to the decision maker kind of in our space like I mentioned before we had to create a resource for the decision maker to bring to his team because while the passer makes the decision there's a group of people that are going to affect his decision on the product and we need to be able to accurately communicate to them without you know three sentences that says here's what this is. They weren't profitable organizations. Most of the churches that we sell to our best customers are churches that have tried everything and it's not working. So these rules these are not hard and fast rules they're guidelines to go by when you're looking at marketplaces and you're trying to go out and find something that's profitable. I would highly recommend that you take these seven things into account as you're moving forward and not just go into it and just go OK. I want to do this so I'm going to do it. Use some of this information to validate and then get to work. Again I think the most important thing to remember is set a date to say by this date I'm going to have my first market picked. Let me just tell you one of my other life lessons too as we transition to the last segment I want to walk through with one of my life goals is this. I stopped asking myself about a year ago what do I want to do with my life as an entrepreneur.

[00:31:07] I don't know if you guys struggle this I've struggled this my whole life is trying to figure out what's the thing that's going to be the next 20 years. That's just not a good question for me. And it may not be for you either either. What I ask now is instead of what am I going to do I ask what am I going to do next. And what you're going to do next is just pick a market that you think will be profitable and start to ideate what your product or offering will be in that marketplace if you're already in that market. You can skip that step. Figuring out what your niche now is going to be and figure out how you're going to offer a product or solution in that space and in it doesn't even have to be a paid product. I mean it can just be something that you're going to put out in the world to help your sales funnel go to the next step or help people move through a part of your sales funnel. Okay last thing I'm going to talk to you about today is I'm going to switch gears going forward I'm going to try to segment these talks so that I'm giving you a couple of different things. One being training like we've done today. Next week we're going to start going into the perfect customer lifecycle and you're definitely going to want to make sure you're subscribed to this for that because I'm going to dive into the seven stages of the perfect customer lifecycle. So if you haven't go ahead Subscribe now and then in each episode I'm going to put some different segments and sometimes it will be a Q&A.

[00:32:19] Sometimes it'll be a systems segment where we talk about a system or product that we're using and then sometimes it will be the one thing segment I want to drive home this idea from the book The One Thing Called get by Gary Keller of asking the question what's the one thing such being done makes everything else easier or unnecessary. What's the one thing that's being done that makes everything else either easier or unnecessary. So this week I'm going to dive into that question about where on that with that right now. So my one thing is the biggest challenge facing right now is launching products and services in this podcast into this space of online entrepreneurs. While I'm running the other business so this podcast is hugely important it's important to me it's an important as an outlet for me to be able to add value to you and to help you get over whatever is holding you back to go to the next level. All of that super important to me. None of it is urgent. There's nothing about this nobody is going to call me tomorrow. Oh my gosh you got to make sure you get the podcast up. Nobody's going to care. We're in you know with this podcast being fairly new. There's not even that many people that are listening to it yet. OK. Now you may be listening to this years down the road and hopefully we've got millions of downloads in the early days of this. That's just not true. There is zero urgency to this but it's very important. So what I've got to do what's the one thing I've got to do to make everything else either easier.

[00:33:40] Unnecessary. Well I've got to make sure that the big rocks go on my calendar first. That means that the things that are highly important to me that are not urgent urgent are not the things that are most important have to go on my calendar for. That means that I've got to take time before I start my week to say OK when does this whole podcast manifesto go on in my calendar it takes about an hour and a half to two hours to plan. It takes about an hour to shoot it takes about an hour to edit and then my team launches it so I need about four to five hours to pull this off every week to shoot script shoot at it and launch it. So what I do is I wake up on Sunday mornings and I plan my whole week. Now this doesn't just impact the podcast. This impacts everything that I do in my business because I want to wake up on Sunday morning. I want to take a look at my goals. I try to review Mughals on Sunday morning before I go to church and everything before everybody else gets up. It's just a time I need a time in my week where I don't feel the hurry of business the day to day hurry of business where I can wake up. I'm relaxed. I can take a look at my goals and say okay based on where I'm where I'm going these two three goals that I'm trying to achieve what needs to happen this week. And then I began to plan my week putting the big rocks in first.

[00:34:52] No one that I've got to have some time on the calendar for podcasting in fact podcasting this repertoire of things has to happen for this podcast to go off. It's on my podcast perennially perennially now going forward. So I don't have to plan it on Sunday morning. A lot of other stuff gets playing around it. The other thing I've got to do is once I once I plan and I have to protect it and that's for most of us most of you me. The hardest thing about planning anything is to make sure that we've actually got time to do it in emergencies don't pop up. And so what I do is I plan twice as much time as I think I need for something and then I plan time for emergencies I call it catch up time so I actually plan emergency response times throughout my weight because I know that that's something that's going to happen. Things are going to pop up throughout the week that need to be done that are urgent. The thing right now that's popping up is we did a bunch of work on our cell process throughout our 24 month project process and that process has blown up it's new and incredible we've got way more people upgrading the challenges. Somewhere in that process we've got a failure that's happening where people try to say well that's a pretty urgent thing. And if I wasn't careful I could have woken up this morning instead of doing the podcast I would have been doing taking care of that but instead I've got time on my calendar to afternoon to catch up to deal with things like that.

[00:36:11] The other thing that forces me to do is to allow Jessica to take a swing at solving some of these problems which is one of my biggest weaknesses being a guy that loves to problem problem solve is taking things away from my team and going OK I'll fix this OK. The other thing that you may or may not have heard from me say there is you need to put twice as much time on your calendar to pull these things off as you think you need. Now my first thought when I thought about that my coaches coaching me up on that was you know I can't give everything that I need to do twice as much time I won't get stuff done. Well the bottom line is this. That's why it's so important to know what the most important things are what the one thing is that you need to do next because you are not going to get everything done especially if you're working a full time job and trying to do a side hustle getting an information product business going or you've got a sales job where they require you to make phone calls. But you know that there's a better way to do that and you're trying to build it if you've got all of that going on there is no time to spend twice as much time on stuff. Let me just tell you that's a law and you don't need to buy into it.

[00:37:12] You've got to get focused on the one or the two or three things are going to make the biggest impact and then go after them in a medieval way and make sure that when you start those products those projects you've given yourself enough time to finish. OK. I hope I've given you a ton to think about today. This was a really good episode for me to work through because I had to take a step back from that as we're beginning to define new markets that we're going into it was really important to me to go back and go OK let me pull my my old notes out on how to do this and run it back down with you. So I want to say thank you for taking the time to be on here with me. If you haven't already go to Richard Cheney dot com or slash register and check out the free membership site. They I'm constantly putting new content on there. There's some great stuff on their own limiting beliefs and how to build your email list fast and what it looks like to start a business with no money and you can check all that out there. And if you haven't already go and subscribe and I will see you in the next episode where we're going to talk about how do you attract traffic and capture leads. This is going to be a good one. I don't care what you're selling. You're always going to need a way to generate interest from people and to capture leads and follow up. And next week we're going to dive into that. You don't want to miss it. Go ahead and subscribe now and I will see you or I will hear you in the next podcast. Thanks a lot.

[00:38:34] Thanks for being with us on the show. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and remember to register for the free premium content mentioned in this session at a rep show dot com slash register. Thanks for listening to the show. We'll catch you next time